Over the past few years, the notion of smart connected objects such as sensors and actuators opened the door to an endless number of applications such as smart grids, connected vehicles, smart cities, or smart healthcare, to mention a very few. To that end, several “architectures” have been proposed, generally consisting of either connecting these devices through multi-protocol gateways or using the Internet Protocol (IP) (e.g., IPv6) end-to-end, in addition to various mixed options.
So far, the typical strategy consisted of implementing sophisticated networking protocols on constrained devices, responsible of handling quality of service (QoS), routing, management, traffic engineering, sensing, algorithms for traffic reduction in the network, sophisticated strategies to increase channel capacity on low-bandwidth links, self-healing techniques for fast failure restoration in addition to constrained-routing, call admission control (CAC) and back-pressure mechanisms, etc. In other words, the general consensus has been to make the “Internet of Things” (e.g., low-power and lossy networks or LLNs) as smart as possible, still while bounding the required resources at the edge of the IoT.